8 Owe no one anything, except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. 9 The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; you shall not murder; you shall not steal; you shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law
11 Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is already the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; 12 the night is far gone; the day is near. Let us then throw off[a] the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; 13 let us walk decently as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in illicit sex and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. 14 Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
Romans 13:8-14 (NRSUE)
Recently, we were having dinner with a gay couple who are family friends. We were exchanging notes about parenting. They shared a story of how their child’s friend’s straight parent, with whom they co-organize play dates and activities for their kids, randomly told them one day, “We are Christian; just want you to know that.”
The first mistaken and loaded assumption is that such a statement is self-explanatory. It does not seem to occur to the person making the statement that one can be Christian and gay. Or, as the title of William Stell’s new book (from which I will draw in the next paragraphs) notes, one can be born again queer. And, it certainly does not occur to them that one can be gay with or without being Christian and that Christians need not—should not—offer unsolicited feedback on beautiful queer love. And if you knew the couple I am describing, you too would know that.
Despite the anti-gay verses and positions people derive from Paul’s letters, I want to argue that there is a priority of love such that the essence of being Christian is to love straight (in the sense of undiluted love) rather than get caught up in straight love hegemony. Paul writes in Romans 13:8, “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.” It is certainly not the only place in Paul’s letters that we encounter the priority of love. In Romans 13:10, Paul notes, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” And of course, there is 1 Corinthians 13:13 where we get Paul saying that love is greater than hope and greater than faith.
Many Christians and religious people express a worry about love—that “love” by itself is nebulous, that it could mean anything and everything and thus nothing at all. The anti-gay version of that worry, as expressed in a 1967 editorial remark in Christianity Today, goes something like this: “In the new morality you decide what love is in the heat of the moment, maybe in the back seat of the car, in the moment of uncontrolled or well-nigh uncontrolled passion” (Stell, 35). Despite such dominant anti-gay Christian rhetoric, there is a significant and often overlooked history of evangelical gay activism. As Stell notes, “[evangelical gay activists] preferred to argue that homosexuality was morally neutral—that is, like heterosexuality, it could be practiced in virtuous or sinful ways” (Stell, 4). Although I don’t share his atonement theology, Lonnie Frisbee’s argument that “Jesus died to take away your sins. Not your sexuality” (Stell, 74) is a good one when it comes to queer love.
The statement “We are Christian; just want you to know that” does not do justice either to such a history of evangelical activism that took the Bible seriously, nor does it do justice to the priority of love. While I cannot imagine the confusion and hurt queer people experience upon hearing such statements, it occurs to me that James Baldwin was right when he said in his 1955 essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” that sentimentality is “the mask of cruelty” (150). While the statement might feel like the disclosure of an honest person compelled to speak the truth of how they feel, such sentimentality is better seen as “the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel” because such emotion betrays their “aversion to experience.”
Speaking of experience, Christians sometimes base their arguments on mistaken notions of “natural law” (a system of ethics derived from nature) to argue implicitly that homosexuality is “unnatural.” I have heard this argument made by regular people in casual conversations in the street corner and in PhD seminar discussions. In both instances, I have encouraged people to google “homosexuality in animals” and click on “images” to see for themselves how unnatural or not homosexuality is in animals. I’ve since been encouraged by my gay friends to offer more sophisticated accounts such as A Field Guide to Gay Mammals.
Moving from experience to scripture as a source of theology, it helps to recall how evangelical gay activists used their reading of the Bible to counter anti-gay positions and lift up the priority of love. As one Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC) minister wrote in an open letter to an antigay Californian politician, “The Apostle [Paul] is not talking about a gay couple in Huntington Beach who are faithful to each other, who hold good jobs, pay their taxes, attend church regularly, and vote….The Apostle Paul condemned the perverted aspects of homosexuality and heterosexuality. So do I and so do you.” (Stell, 85). Another MCC joke builds on a most serious theological claim that humans are saved by grace alone and not by works. The joke goes: “Jesus never said, ‘Only you heterosexuals, who [have] sex in the missionary position with a member of the opposite sex, can become followers of mine.’ No! Never! He did say, ‘I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst’” (Stell, 86).
Other anti-gay Christians use “a theological concept of gender complementarity to argue for the impossibility of gay love” (Stell, 50). Here again it helps to remember that theologians have long questioned the male-female binary that informs gender complementarity, as evidenced in Megan K. DeFranza’s helpful turn of phrase, “male, female, and intersex in the image of God.” Creation is not simply male-female. Herein lies another theological and biological mistake in the statement “We are Christian; just want you to know that.”
In another important and related matter, “scholars and others [and here we can include the one making the “we-are-Christian-just-want-you-to-know-that” statement] have long erected and treated as self-evident a binary between secular liberalism in favor of sexual freedom and religious conservatism in favour of sexual expression” (Stell, 8). That apparent self-evident binary is simply false. While there is no point denying that the Bible does contain verses that are and can be used against queer people, truer is a more fundamental fact: Such verses were written in the context of and against rape, displays of power, and cultic prostitution, and not loving queer relationships. Some of the most important insights here were developed by evangelical gay activists. William Stell’s Born Again Queer is a good place to start to gather the evidence.
Reading the lectionary text from Romans 13 brought up for me this important history of evangelical gay activism for whom, I believe, the text says, “Love, straight.” Not straight love. Not even queer love necessarily. After all, there is no gay agenda to make straight people queer. Queer people just want to be left alone without having to be insulted by unthinking sentimentality. Love straight. Love is love, both straight and queer. lf “love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:10), then where love is, God is. Such is the priority of love.
